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Corporate Engagement Services

The University of Arizona’s Corporate Engagement Services group offers a streamlined and efficient experience for industry partners to access the depth and breadth of UA services, capabilities, and resources.

With activities ranging from convening senior corporate visits, to jointly developing proposals with industry, to ensuring that more UA graduates can find challenging jobs without leaving the state of Arizona, our focus is to connect, coordinate, and communicate with units across campus to customize meaningful collaborative relationships with our corporate partners.

The Innovation Hub

The University of Arizona’s mission is to improve the prospects and enrich the lives of the people of Arizona and the world through education, research, creative expression, and community and business partnerships. In pursuing this mission, the UA is fulfilling one of the fundamental roles of a top-tier public research university in the 21st century: to act as an innovation hub.

This is the third step in the knowledge positioning of universities.

Eight hundred years ago, the modern university was created as a scholarly storehouse: a place to keep ancient scholarship safe during the threatening medieval environment.

During the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution led to a new, overlapping role for the university: as a competence factory. Proper management of resources (students, faculty, facilities) would lead to the creation of new knowledge, especially in agriculture, engineering, and the sciences. This model dominated the 20th century, contributed to the Allies’ victory in World War II, and led to the value creation explosion of Silicon Valley.

The innovation hub is a third step in the evolution. Without losing either of the prior roles, research universities have become a place where disconnected groups can meet and collaborate. Faculty, staff, and students are exposed to federal, state, and municipal agencies, corporate partners, entrepreneurs, investors, international partners, and more.

Connect, Coordinate, Communicate

As a neutral party, the UA acts as a hub, to connect individuals and teams who otherwise might never meet. University staff can coordinate activities—particularly challenging when the private sector operates with different timing, incentives, and metrics of success. And the University makes a great place to communicate results—linking back to the mission of generating local and global impact.

Our Services

Connect industry to development and test facilities through UA Tech Parks